Happy 14th Birthday, Nick!

I think Nick is learning it can be tough to have a birthday on Christmas Eve. You never get to celebrate with friends, and your day tends to be overshadowed by the celebration of the birth of another baby born half a world away a couple thousand years ago.

But we try to make his day special, and he's still basically the same little boy who would say "I like having my birthday next to Jesus's".

So who was I to say no when all he wanted for his birthday were my homemade chicken enchiladas for dinner, strawberry dessert instead of a cake, and to go see the Christmas lights at the temple? (Okay, four. He also wanted a Kindle.)

The strawberry dessert was the hardest, apparently there was some strawberry blight and 2 out of 3 of the stores I went to were out of strawberries, and the third charged me an arm and a leg for barely adequate berries.

I did have one little surprise up my sleeve. The Sunday before his birthday I sat next to my friend Scarlett. Her family owns a Cold Stone Creamery and she was saying how on Christmas Eve, they were going to send the employees home early, then hand out free ice-cream in their pajamas.

I thought Nick would get a kick out of that. In fact, I knew it would make his day- free ice-cream, served by friends in their pj's, what's not to love? So we hatched a plan...

We had to time it right, and eat dinner early, so we could head off to "see the lights" by 5 pm. Of course the sun wasn't quite yet down and the kids were starting to worry that we'd get there too early to actually see the lights. And then they were pretty confused when we pulled into a random parking lot because I "felt like ice-cream".

The best part had to have been when Scarlett dished him up a huge bowl of ice-cream and said "Happy Birthday, Nick!"

To which he responded, "Hey! How did you know it was my birthday?"

And she pointed to the back wall and said "Cause it says so right there!"

That's when he noticed for the first time the birthday balloons, and the "Happy Birthday Nick" sign, and the streamers.... (To be fair, the whole place was decked out in red and green streamers, and so to the casual observer it just looked very Christmasy)

I think for the first time, he was totally speechless.

Then while we ate our ice-cream we were entertained with Mason's (Scarlett's son) wicked Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktail impersonation, only with ice-cream and caramel sauce. Scarlett was also pretty impressive as she caught several of his flying balls of ice-cream.

Then it was finally time to be off to the temple to see the lights. It was crowded, but a beautiful evening to be there. Nick enjoyed chatting it up with the missionaries and commented how happy and friendly they are and how he can't wait to go on his mission.

And my first thought was that he's already got the happy and friendly part down, he should make a pretty great missionary....

and then I wanted to scream "No!" because it hit me- I have just 5 short years left. 6 months and he'll be in high school. 4 1/2 years until he graduates. Just two more until he will be driving. And time seems to be speeding up and as proud as I am of the young man he is turning into, I found myself a little sad too...

Happy Birthday, Nick! (Stop growing okay? Please?)